Carolyn Scott Kortge has traveled the path from fitness walker to racewalker to spirited walker. Her book will be on the shelves in May, and can be ordered now through our Amazon.com partner. Carolyn was pleased to give us an interview about her techniques.
What is your method for turning fitness walking into spirited walking?
Focus, or mindfulness, is what distinguishes spirited walking from fitness walking for me. My approach borrows from sports psychology and from traditional meditation to create mental and physical tools that keep us awake and aware during walks.
It's always tempting to 'space out' on a walk--to let the thoughts meander willy-nilly while we take a mental rest. Instead of rest, we often end up chasing loose ends and dodging arrows. When the head and the body are going in different directions, it's difficult to reach any goal. Spirited walking helps them work together.
The Spirited Walker: Fitness Walking for Clarity, Balance and Spiritual Connection provides lots of suggestions and techniques for adding focus to walks. They range from visualizations to affirmations to singing "Yankee Doodle Dandy." Some are playful; all are powerful. All of them help you get more out of a workout, especially when you combine them with aerobic exertion.
Any good, aerobic workout pushes you out of your comfort zone for a while. That's where you are most likely to encounter mental protests and complaints. Every walker is familiar with mind chatter. We know the voices in the head that tell us we are too tired to walk fast today, or too old, or too out of shape. I maintain that if you can talk yourself OUT of a workout, you can also talk yourself INTO one. The techniques for doing don't have to be spiritual. They simply have to replace the negative messages that bog you down if they circle endlessly in the head.
It's ever so much easier to keep up a brisk walk when you hear "Yes, I can" in your head instead of "I'm too tired," or "This is hard." For years, I had a voice that said I was too clumsy to be good at any physical activity. When I began race walking, it mocked me. "I told you so," it said when I went through the awkward movements of learning a new technique. "You look really dumb," it taunted. "You've never been good at sports."
My choice was to give in to the voice, and give up on my goal of learning how to racewalk, or to find a way to keep my internal critic quiet. I decided to out-talk it. "I am a graceful and active woman, at ease in a strong healthy body," I affirmed to myself when the critic appeared. The words blocked the interference of self-doubt. As my walking pace picked up, I began to create walking mantras, phrases that I repeated in rhythm with my steps. "I am here and I am walking," I repeat to restore focus when I discover that my mind is planning dinner or rehashing a conversation. "I am here and I am breathing." I say, and my focus comes to simply breathing in and out, not thinking, not making plans, not worrying.
Sometimes I entertain myself, and create mind-body harmony, with a waltz-walk. This is a great focusing tool because it uses a three-beat rhythm which demands greater attentiveness for most people than the more familiar 4-beat pattern. "I-am-here. I am here." I repeat mentally as I swing my arms briskly. Each word punctuates a step. On a hill, the phrase might change to "Yes, I can" Yes, I can."
Sometimes I simply sing to drown out the distractions. When I teach walking clinics, we often do a timed mile walk, just to give people a measure of their walking speed. Everyone gets tired by the last lap because they are working hard. This is when I urge them to breath deep into the belly and call on the energy of "Yankee Doodle Dandy" to get around a final circuit. It's amazing what a change it makes.
There are lots more suggestions in the book. I've focused mainly on verbal techniques here but the book also has chapters that talk about visualization, breath and posture focus techniques. Each chapter of The Spirited Walker has suggested exercises that give people guidelines for trying a variety of methods. My own walks often cycle through two or three different techniques in half an hour. I love variety.
